She may not have yet found her area of interest. If she views science as only what she is taught in school with tests and grades and not topics she finds interesting, then she has not had a chance understand what "science" encompasses.
Agreed. I feel that. It is tricky to negotiate the whims and whiles of youth. My daughter is 16 with 1.75 years of secondary education remaining. 3 years ago she was floundering at school and in her head. Her Mum is obsessed with results and relentlessly lays on the pressure to Achieve. I was a teacher for 20 years, and I know that tests and grades mean sweet fuck-all in the final analysis. I told my kid that, and she believed it. Since then, she has changed the way she looks at school. She knows a test is a very arbitrary checkpoint. If she gets a low grade, she now wants to learn from the error, to patch up holes in her understanding. So now she doesn't fret so much. She still wants to
do well, but she knows
that is also a placeholder for real knowledge.
Her grades have gone from flat Cs to 90% As in a very short time, and she has even dropped her beloved Drama class to fill up on science, to our amazement. I think a bit of arts to balance out the heavy is a good thing, but she says she doesn't want to miss the opportunity to explore as much real stuff as she can. She sees taking Maths, Physics, Chem and Biology as broadening her field, not narrowing it. I think she knows how it will better inform her choices regarding a career down the line. English was my only interest as a secondary school student, so I'm (selfishly
) glad she has decided to retain that.
I credit her Mum for instilling in her the importance of education and for sending her to remedial tutoring when she didn't want to go. She also has a great relationship with her excellent (finally) teachers. I told her that by and large, every teacher struggles and carries a massive burden that the kids in class don't usually see, so she should get alongside them rather than seeing them as adversaries the way the 'cool kids' tend to do. They've responded exactly as I told her they would, with gratitude, care and energy in relation to her progress and curiosity. But I feel that the crux was the change in her attitude towards the seemingly unachievable. Don't doubt their capacity to change it up when given the keys to unlock a new paradigm of what success means.
She may be interested in houseplants or gardening (I'm just giving examples). This is all science. Is it taught in school? Probably not. She is also (at her age) influenced by peers as well as her parents. If she is not exposed to new experiences then she doesn't know.
For us it was first the bushwalks and the animals and then the stars. I started taking my daughter camping from the age of 8. I mean real 7-hour drive into the desert type camping where she could see the full starfield in all its glory and get a feel for country and lore (Indigenous ways of seeing). I shall never forget being awake at around 2 or 3am in my swag when she unzipped her tent to go out for a wee and just went
whoah when she saw the cosmos with a full moon above and a massive ice ring surrounding it. She told me about it the next day (didn't know I had witnessed that encounter), and I told her that she saw what ancients probably thought of as a sign from God. It blew her mind into a new hairdo, and she craved more of what's out there from then on. What iphone experience could compete with that. I feel sick for those who are stuck in iPhone-istan. Or Mall-ovia. Yuck. Those poor coolkids.